The Missing Dough(35)

“You can tell them if you want to, but count me out of this,” he said as he stood, threw his napkin on the table, and stormed out of the Slice. At least he tried to. He was locked in, though, so it took him five seconds to fumble with the latch before he could get out.

“I’m sorry about this. We’ll be back,” Samantha said as she hurried out the door after him.

I took another bite of pizza as we waited. “So, are we really helping them now?”

Maddy shook her head. “There’s not a chance of that happening, but if I can get solid alibis for them, we can at least mark them off our list.”

“If neither of them did it, that just leaves Bernie Maine. If.”

“If what?”

“If we’ve found all of our suspects yet,” I said.

“Who else did you have in mind?” Maddy asked as she took another bite of pizza.

“I don’t know, but then again, we just started digging. It’s hard to say who else might turn up on our suspect list. Grant had a way of riling folks up, didn’t he?”

“It’s a skill that he’d apparently gotten better at over the years.”

“What do you think?” I asked her. “Could he have swindled other investors, as well?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” she said. “Eleanor, I should have listened to you all those years ago. You saw right through him, and you tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it, Maddy. I got lucky finding Joe, and now you’ve got Bob in your life. We all win some, and we lose some.”

“I seem to have picked more than my share of losers over the years, though,” she said. “As bad as Grant was when we were married, I never would have believed that he could take such a turn for the worse. Sharon must have been heartbroken.”

“I’m sure she knew that she did what she could,” I said as I glanced toward the door. “I’m not positive they’re coming back, are you?”

“Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind. They’re gone for good,” Maddy said as she took another bite of her pizza and then dropped it onto her plate. “Forgive me for throwing away your hard work, but I’ve kind of lost my appetite for this right now.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said as I gathered everything together and headed for the nearest trash can.

“You’re not chucking that because of me, are you?”

“No way. Maybe later I’ll make us a different kind of snack, but right now I think we should get out of here while we still have the chance.”

“Are we going to go out looking for Kenny and Samantha?” she asked me as I rinsed the plates in back.

“I’ve got a feeling that we’re going to have to wait until they’re ready to talk to us, but I’d love to see if we can find Bernie Maine.”

“In thirty minutes?” Maddy asked me.

“No, you’re right. We need at least an hour and a half to get to Cow Spots and back and still talk to him. Why don’t you put up a sign that we’re going to be late starting our dinner shift tonight?”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“I’m calling Josh to give him a heads-up about what we’re planning to do,” I said. “There’s no reason to make him wait out front for us while we’re somewhere out of town, digging into murder.”

After we had wrapped up what we needed to do in the kitchen and had told Josh about our plans, Maddy and I left the Slice in search of the elusive Bernie Maine.





Chapter 9

“I’ve got a question for you,” Maddy said as we started driving my car toward the town of Cow Spots.

“Is it about the case?” I asked.

“No, it’s about this place where we’re heading. Why on earth would anyone ever call their hometown Cow Spots in the first place? It’s a crazy thing to name a place, and that’s even taking into consideration that North Carolina’s known for some of its weird town names.”

I laughed. “What did you do? Fall asleep in fifth grade North Carolina geography class? Don’t you remember? That’s when they taught us all kinds of things about the origins of different city and county names in the state.”

“Ms. Harpold didn’t cover any of that,” Maddy said. “The ink was still wet on her diploma when she took over my class, so it’s hard to say what all I missed out on. She’d had her heart set on teaching high school girls’ phys ed, and at the last second, they stuck her with us. You had Mrs. Ingersoll, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, remembering the oldest teacher I’d ever had. “She had to be a hundred and five by the time she finally retired, but the woman was as sharp as she could be up until the last day of class.”